


His Finely Ground-Up Dust

by yuletide_archivist



Category: Scrubs
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2008-12-24
Updated: 2008-12-24
Packaged: 2018-01-25 07:07:24
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,039
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1638140
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/yuletide_archivist/pseuds/yuletide_archivist
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Perry Cox was not always the raving, angry, borderline psychotic doctor he is today; getting there took time, perseverance, and creativity.</p>
            </blockquote>





	His Finely Ground-Up Dust

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks to Dafna Greer for her last-minute beta!
> 
> Written for wickedfox

 

 

Perry Cox was not always the raving, angry, borderline psychotic doctor he is today; getting there took time, perseverance, and heaps of creativity. He worked at it like a sculptor carefully molds what he desperately wishes to become a masterpiece, cupping the clay to match the vision. Or perhaps a more apt metaphor would be of the sculptor after the completing a piece. Like the artist frustrated with what refused to become perfect, Cox smashed his patience and tolerance with a hammer, grinding down the pieces into a fine dust.

But the dust remained, finer with every blow Perry delivered.

He tries to ignore it, washing his hands of the whole enterprise. But others in his stupid, stupid, mad, insane-driving life that leads him to drink, insist on brushing it up into a pile and examining the remains with a lens. "They should write a comic book series about you," JD sighs dreamily. "I actually have several ideas on that front, like, your alter-ego isn't the super-hero, like Batman, but the boring human, like Super Man. Super Cox! Though I'm not sure about that, there's something mildly homoerotic about it--"

Perry takes a deep breath, for he needs a lungful of air to get through one of his spiels (he's learned through practice that the effect is ruined if he stops for breath halfway through). "Oh my _god_ , do you actually hear yourself when you talk, Fatima, and, yes, today we're being ethnically conscious, because The Evil Overlord was insisting earlier that the hospital has to be more politically correct to get more big bucks from the international organizations, but as I was saying, Ayumi, do you hear yourself when you talk, or do your ears just turn themselves off like a defective, day-old appliance from Radio Shack? Because I think if you ever heard the sheer idiocy your mouth spews, you would take that stethoscope and wrap it real tight around your throat in utter despair at just how incredibly, George Washington-monumentally hopeless you are."

"Maybe I could call the hero Super Rant," JD speculates, undisturbed by the insults. Perry resists the urge to push him down the stairs and settles for stomping away. 

But the words "Super Cox" ring through his head for the rest of the day, and he almost-- almost-- asks Jordan to call him that in bed. He knows she would, but only after nearly laughing herself to death. Still, the main reason he doesn't ask is that he knows that if he does, she will tell someone at work the next day, and it would find its way through the whole hospital. And he doesn't want to give JD the satisfaction that he liked one of his moronic ideas. Or that he was even listening, for that matter.

It isn't just JD that won't let Cox forget about his inner decency. It's like torture to admit this (and even if Perry has never been tortured, he has a notion of what it must be like, having passed medical school and, worse, trained generation after generation of interns, and that was a special punishment all of its own; one more reason to fall into drink), because it is oh so cheesy and oh so trite and really, could he behave anymore like a redeemed villain in a movie made for TV, but sometimes, looking at his son Jack, he wonders if maybe there really isn't a reason to the sound and fury that is life. 

He can't even explain why one more miserable person on this overcrowded Earth (and Perry isn't convinced that if even if there were only one human being, that wouldn't be overpopulation) could be any kind of ticket to hope, but it is. If he went to a psychiatrist, or talked it out with Carla, Perry is sure they'd spout out something about love and paternal instinct, but that's why he doesn't ever ask them about it. 

He does ask Jack, and his little tycoon gives much better answers: "Because the choochoo goes into the tunnel," Jack solemnly says when Perry asks him why having a son matters, and darn if that isn't the best explanation he's heard to this day on the subject.

And, the fact of the matter is, it isn't just other people that preserve the remaining dust of Perry's humanity; he does that all on his own. Maybe he drinks himself into a stupor every night, maybe he yells at everyone he's ever cared about, maybe he harasses the very patients he once swore to never hurt (and isn't that Hippocratic oath a joke; sometimes he has no choice but to cause crippling pain to get to a cure), and maybe his son will need daily psychotherapy to work through all the dysfunctions he passed onto him. And Perry definitely doesn't like what sees in the mirror, aside from his picture-perfect body. Even that, he knows, is only something he strives to maintain because it was, for so long, the only thing that kept him from despising himself more than he already did. He's not sure it won't be that way again, someday.

But if he does all those things, and others worse, he also gets out of bed everyday (or most of them). He drags himself to that hell-hole called a hospital and faces waves of sick, tired people and makes their suffering just a little less hard to bear. He loves his demonic ex-wife in the best and only way he knows how and he tries to be honest to his son, since that may be the only good thing he has to give him. 

It did take time for Perry to become the bitter cynic he is today, and he did an excellent job of it. No one in five counties beats him at rage, at hurting feelings, at destroying relationships. But that doesn't mean that he hasn't worked, simultaneously, to work in the opposite direction, taking that dust and shaping it into patterns like a Zen exercise. A part of him, the part he ignores, hopes that the little things, like knowing how many milligrams to prescribe or play-wrestling with his son, will help to rebuild what he couldn't help but destroy. 

 


End file.
